Ali Smith on the ‘Artful’ Backstory to Her Book

In Ali Smith’s new book “Artful,” the Scottish-born author nimbly segues between and fuses academic material with a more traditional narrative. Ostensibly about a character literally haunted by a former lover, the fiction-essay hybrid jumps between the narrator’s attempts to re-read a dilapidated copy of Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” and a series of lectures, prepared by the deceased lover, about art and literature.

“Artful” began as a series of lectures at St. Anne’s College, Oxford in February 2012, which Ms. Smith, in an email, says she reproduced word for word in the book, “except I had time to take all the mistakes and misquotes I made in the lectures out (thank goodness).”